On Jan. 1, 2002, when Michael
Bloomberg was sworn into office, these things barely existed: iPods,
Blackberries, pocket digital cameras. These things didn't exist at all:
the Barclays Center, Citi Field, One World Trade, or the Gehry NY
building.

People smoked, all the time, in
restaurants and bars. Almost no one rode bikes, and T.V.-less yellow
cabs drove down Broadway right through Times Square. Back then, a market
rate apartment in Harlem was about $1,200 — about half of what it is
today. Pizza was $1.50 a slice, same price as a subway token.

Carrie
Bradshaw lived in a Manhattan brownstone, drank cosmopolitans and typed
onto a black and white computer screen. The High Line was a rusted and
weedy hulk, not the locale for furtive kisses for the "Girls" crew
before they head home to Brooklyn. Adlai Stevenson High School still
existed. The Success Academy and six hundred other schools did not.

You could be anonymous in 2001. Now, not so much. We are watched, everywhere, if not by security cameras, then by each other.

New York has been transformed in the last 12 years, in ways that are wrenching and huge and intimate.

Might I add: the city was also still
reeling from 9/11. Ground Zero was a smoking hole with clean-up
crews moving away the rubble of the old World Trade Centers and still
finding bodies.

Back then, our city's biggest fear was getting hit by another terrorist attack. Now it's being able to afford to live here.

The
first decade of the 21st century has been a profound transitory time
for our city. I don't recognize the town I was born in the 1970s, and
grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. The 20th century is but a faint memory
now, another time that is both feared and fetishized in our collective
memory. If you go back and watch movies made in NYC back then, movies
like "Taxi Driver", "Do the Right Thing" and "Bad Lieutenant", it
made NYC look like a nightmare. Now we go to movies like the recently
released "American Hustle", set in the late 1970s, and you'd think the
city was simply "funkytown" back then.

Perhaps it was better,
perhaps it was worse. Perhaps what we've gained in public safety,
health, and schools has been lost in a sky-high cost of living, a
bleaching of the culture, and a loss of communal spirit. The debate
rages endlessly on. But one thing is clear: maybe we don't actually want
to live in Funkytown anymore but we still want to talk about it.

And
in 2013, four notable New Yorkers died who lives embodied the late 20th
century city, who rode high during the era of Funkytown: former mayor
Ed Koch, rocker Lou Reed, pornographer Al Goldstein, and news reporter
Stan Brooks. They were four very different men,
occupying quite different spheres in this city's life and imagination,
but their lives and careers are essential to understanding that time in
our city's life that is now so definitely over.

Ed Koch was
mayor from 1978 to 1989. In his time, he improved the city's disastrous
finances and built affordable housing. He had a proud legacy but was
also very divisive. He was famously irrascible, screaming at
anyone who disagreed with him, and he seemed to relish conflict with
anyone who wanted it. Koch's natural successor was not his actual
successor, David Dinkins, but Rudy Giuliani: both men polarized the city,
setting black against white, rich against poor. The Bloomberg era has
been markedly different both in tone and governance: race relations have
greatly improved and he has openly supported gay marriage. As for the
poor, Bloomberg hasn't played rich against poor: he's simply forgotten
about the poor and forced them out of the city. (Problem solved.) So a
governing style of quiet ruthlessness and embracing diversity has
replaced the divisive, rough-and-tumble governing style of
Funkytown -- and the man who embodied its spirit left us in 2013.

Lou
Reed made his musical career in the 1960s and 1970s writing songs about
drugs, death, bondage, and drag. His music was about the dirty and
dangerous city -- and it was brilliant. As NYC changed and Lou Reed got
older, his music became legendary not only for its great experimentation
but also for its memories of the vanished city. The city of "Sally
Can't Dance" and "Dirty Boulevard" is gone and now, sadly in 2013, is Lou Reed.
But we'll always listen to his music and remember that time and its
poet, a man who made lyrical beauty out of the decay of Funkytown.

Today,
anyone can get porn on the web. My generation was the last that had to
work hard to get its porn (usually by begging an older friend to buy a
magazine from a creepy vendor and then hiding it under the bedroom mattress,
stressing out that mom would find it when making the bed or discover us
reading it when she called us to dinner -- let me tell you, it was
stressful) but today's "yutes" can simply go online, search vast amounts
of naughty content, and then hit the "Clear History" tab on their
browsers when mom calls. The man who represented
the mattresses-hiding time of porn was Al Goldstein, the foulmouthed
pornographer and provocateur and New Yorker extraordinaire, who founded
"Screw" magazine in the 1960s and then, from 1974 to 2003, hosted
the racy cable show "Midnight Blue" on Channel J. He was gross and
offensive and wanted you to know it. He was "the man" during the time
when Times Square was a bastion of porno theaters and drug dealers. Al
Goldstein became the symbol (for many) of everything that was wrong with
NYC back then, the filth that Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" so
desperately wanted to wash away. Giuliani started the scrubbing in the
1990s with raids and new blue laws but, in the Bloomberg era, it was
washed away by the Internet and gentrification. Goldstein's magazine and
TV show didn't survive, and he literally became homeless as a result.
But his recent death is a reminder of that time, of the sleaze of
Funkytown, when the city was a wild place -- fun for some, revolting for
others -- that is now clean and, for many, very boring.

And finally, Stan
Brooks. You might know his name: he was a reporter for 1010 WINS radio
news for decades. He had a great voice, one that was born for radio, and he reported on everything from the 1971 Attica Prison riots to
the recent election of Bill De Blasio as mayor. Any history that was
made in NYC over the last 50 years, Stan Brooks reported it first. If
you ever saw the movies "Goodfellas", it's his voice that reports on the
Lufthansa heist made famous in that classic film. Stan Brooks was the
memory bank of this city, the man who explained what was going on in
Funkytown to its residents. Now Stan Brooks is gone, along with the city
he reported about for so long. We've lost a great reporter, a great New
York voice, and a living link to our city's past.

As another great New Yorker, novelist Don DeLillo wrote: "It's all falling indelibly into the past."

The song "Funkytown" was a one-hit
wonder released in 1980, a year when the city was deep in the era of Ed
Koch, Lou Reed, Al Goldstein, and Stan Brooks, and when yours truly
was just three years old. The song was written by a guy named
Steven Greenberg for a band called Lipps, Inc who were all from
Minneapolis and dreamed of moving to NYC. The song was an open
love letter to the dream of this city, to its spirit and danger, to why
people wanted to live here, even back then, the so-called bad old days.
Just remember the first few lines:

Gotta make a move to aTown that's right for meTown to get me movin'Keep me groovin' with someEnergy

You can't be funky without some energy, and energy was the essence of the Funkytown era -- the era that the Bloomberg years have so definitively vanquished

Now our city moves into a new era.
Sadly, these four great New Yorkers won't be there to see it. But they
made NYC an interesting place in the last decades of the 20th century,
they gave the city its unique energy, and for that we thank them.

Now,
firmly in the second decade of the 21st century, and the dangerous
energy of that time has been replaced by a safe apathy. We may not be
going back to Funkytown anytime soon, but we need to shed the apathy and
re-find its energy. That's the way we'll honor their legacies in the new era that's about to begin.